The unity of the Republic, that of science, that of the personality, that of the national territory, or that of "culture" have never been anything but fic­tions. But they were effective. What is certain is that the illusion of unity can no longer do its work offoolingpeople, of bringing them into line, of dis­ciplining them. In every domain, hegemony is dead and the singularities are becoming wild: they bear their own meaning in themselves, no longer expecting it from a general order. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.22

As something endured, the process of fragmentation of the world can drive people into misery, isolation, schizophrenia. It can be experienced as a senseless loss in the lives of human beings. We're invaded by nostalgia then. Belonging is all that remains for those who no longer have anything. At the cost of accepting fragmentation as a starting point, it can also give rise to an intensification and pluralization of the bonds that constitute us. Then fragmentation doesn't signify separation but a shimmering of the world. […] With the endless fragmentation of the world there is a vertiginous increase in the qualitative enrich­ ment of life, and a profusion of forms-for someone who thinks about the promise of com­munism it contains. In the fragmentation there is something that points toward what we call "communism": it's the return to earth, the end of any bringing into equivalence, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the defeat of subsumption, of abstrac­tion, the fact that moments, places, things, beings and animals all acquire a proper name-their proper name. Every creation is born of a splitting off from the whole. As embryology shows, each individual is the possibility of a new species as soon as it appropriates the conditions that immediately surround it. If the Earth is so rich in natural envi­ronments this is due to its complete absence of uniformity. Realizing the promise of communism contained in the world's fragmentation demands a gesture, a gesture to be performed over and over again, a gesture that is life itself: that of creating pathways between the fragments, of placing them in contact, of organizing their encounter, of opening up the roads that lead from one friendly piece of the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of establishing the good art of distances between worlds. It's true that the world's fragmentation disorients and unsettles all the inherited certainties, that it defies all of our politi­cal and existential categories, that it removes the ground underlying the revolutionary tradition itself: it challenges us. […] Here is the paradox, then: being constrained to unity undoes us, the lie of social life makes us psychotic, and embracing fragmentation is what allows us to regain a serene presence to the world. There is a certain mental position where this fact ceases to be perceived in a contradictory way. That is where we place ourselves. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.45-46

Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure-Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that it's one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the con­temporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked facades of the old hege­monies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn't get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on "the real," reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentious, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there's no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorpo­rated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don't feel like we belong to a "Google humanity," but that's fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of"users," we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the "rulers of tomorrow": fragmenta­tion is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d'etre. The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be "linking up the entire world" what they're actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone clois­tered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more "friends" when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn't transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this "society" collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggre­gates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming con­nections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other. The Invisible Committee, Now, p. 46-49

It is amusing to remark, that many of those who advise a union with the middle classes are strenuous supporters of the present co-operative system; they seek the support of the middle class, and tell us to expect it—with the same breath shouting to the world, that their "co-operation" will destroy the shopkeepers! Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.575